Farming chital with carp: how tilapia brood can feed a featherback pond

Chital, the large silvery featherback of Bangladesh's rivers and beels, can be raised in ponds together with carp, and a pond stocked with breeding tilapia can supply the small fish it eats. That was the advice of a farming guide published by the agriculture and nature desk of the Bangladeshi news site Jagonews24 on 14 May 2026. The guide described chital farming as very profitable, said the fish grows fast and seldom falls ill in mixed culture, and set out how many chital and tilapia a farmer should stock, how large the water should be and what to watch for. This report sets out that advice as published, and adds what fisheries research and official statistics available at the time say about the fish, its status in Bangladesh and the way it is bred and raised.

According to the Jagonews24 guide, chital can be cultured in mixed ponds alongside carp species. Because the fish lives by eating the fry of small fish, the guide said, a chital culture pond needs a supply of live food, and it recommended releasing tilapia brood fish into the pond for this purpose. The adult tilapia breed in the pond, and the chital eat their young.

The guide gave its stocking figures per decimal of water area (one decimal is a hundredth of an acre):

• Stock 5 to 6 chital fingerlings per decimal.
• Release chital of 3 to 6 inches in length into the culture pond.
• Stock 5 to 7 tilapia brood fish for every chital; for 5 chital per decimal, that means 35 to 40 tilapia brood.
• Chital can also be raised in the same pond as rui and catla.

The guide recommended choosing a large pond, a gher (an embanked farm enclosure) or a beel for chital, saying that fish grow faster and the profit is greater in a larger water area. It stated that a single chital reaches at least 2 to 3 kg in a year. It also said chital have strong disease resistance, so that in mixed culture there is hardly any disease. These are the guide's own statements: the research cited below gives no one-year growth figure for chital in Bangladeshi ponds and does not measure its disease rate, and no published Department of Fisheries (DoF) or Bangladesh Fisheries Research Institute (BFRI) manual giving the guide's figures could be found. Farmers who want stocking numbers for their own pond, and any doses of lime, fertiliser, feed or medicine, should ask the upazila fisheries officer, the DoF's field officer in each upazila.

The copy of the guide stored on this site had lost the list of practical points that closed the original. The archived Jagonews24 page carried the following advice:

• The pond's banks must be sound and high enough not to be overtopped in the monsoon.
• Keep an alternative source of water so that the pond can be topped up.
• Although chital is predatory by nature, it does not eat large fish; it eats only the fry of small fish.
• Make sure there are enough small fish in a chital farm; otherwise the chital will not grow.
• If small fish run short, nurse rui or mrigal fry separately and supply them as food.
• A farmer without a gher of his own can lease one.
• Stock healthy chital fingerlings of the right species.
• Buy fry and fingerlings from a good hatchery.

The warning about predation is borne out by an earlier report. In June 2024 Prothom Alo reported that a chital of about 9 kg had been caught with a cast net in a household pond in Sonagazi upazila of Feni. The pond's owner, a college student, told the paper that 10 to 12 chital fingerlings had been released along with other fry in 2020, that the pond had never received fish feed apart from household food scraps, and that the chital had been eating the fry of every other kind of fish released over the years, which was why the family had been trying to catch them. The case shows both how large chital can grow in an ordinary pond and why a chital pond needs a planned supply of forage fish.

Chital is Chitala chitala, a member of the Notopteridae, the knifefish or featherback family. In English it is called the Indian featherback, Indian knifefish or humped featherback. Some Bangladeshi studies call it the clown knifefish, although that name is more usually given to a related Southeast Asian species, Chitala ornata, with which chital has often been confused. FishBase, the global fish database, lists chital from the Indus, Ganges-Brahmaputra and Mahanadi river basins, and notes that reports from Thailand, Indochina, Malaysia and Indonesia were based on other Chitala species. Banglapedia, the national encyclopaedia of Bangladesh, counts two featherback species in the country's fresh waters, chital being one of them, and lists chital among the fishes of the beels and floodplains.

FishBase gives the maximum length as 122 cm and the common length as about 75 cm. A study from the University of Rajshahi, citing an earlier Bangladeshi record, notes a chital of 103 cm and 10 kg taken from Gacher Dahar beel in Sylhet. The fish is silvery overall; unlike its relatives, subadults and adults usually carry a series of golden or silvery bars along the back, and they have small dark spots, without pale rings, towards the rear of the body. That spotting is what separates chital from Chitala ornata, whose spots are ringed.

Chital lives in rivers, lakes, beels and channels of the plains, and also in reservoirs, canals and ponds. It can breathe air when it needs to. FishBase records its diet as aquatic insects, molluscs, shrimps and small fishes, and the Rajshahi researchers add that the young also take insects and tender roots of aquatic plants. FishBase gives a water temperature range of 24 to 28 °C and a pH range of 6.0 to 8.0 for the species.

Chital spawns once a year. FishBase gives the season as May to August, and the Rajshahi study, citing Bangladeshi sources, gives June to July. The female lays her eggs on a stake or stump of wood; the male fans them with his tail, keeps them aerated and free of silt and guards them against small catfish and other predators. The flesh has a good flavour but is full of small bones, the Rajshahi study notes, and the fish commands a high market price. In Bangladesh and in neighbouring Assam and West Bengal, chital is prized as a regional delicacy, in dishes such as chital machher jhol, chital muitha and chital peti.

Chital is listed as Endangered in Bangladesh in the national Red List of freshwater fishes published by IUCN Bangladesh in 2015, according to fish surveys of the Gorai River (2021) and the Payra River (2022) published in the journal Heliyon, which give its national and global status side by side. On the global IUCN Red List, assessed in 2010, it is Near Threatened.

Researchers in India reported in 2006, in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation, that wild chital populations had declined by more than 50 percent over the previous few decades. The Rajshahi study names over-exploitation, habitat degradation, pollution and related human pressure as the reasons, and adds that chital fry are not available throughout the year, which is why seed production and culture methods for the species matter both for farmers and for keeping the fish from disappearing.

The Bangladesh Fisheries Research Institute, headquartered in Mymensingh, has worked on exactly this. In February 2020 the daily Samakal reported, citing the institute, that BFRI had developed breeding and culture techniques for 20 threatened indigenous fishes, and chital was on the list along with pabda, gulsha, tengra, meni and phali. The institute's director general told the paper that the conservation research was run from its stations at Jashore, Saidpur and Mymensingh, and that the shrinking of inland open waters had already destroyed many breeding and feeding grounds of native fish. Samakal reported that more than a hundred hatcheries were by then producing fry of native species with BFRI's methods, and that chital and other once-scarce fishes had become more available in the markets.

The DoF's own statistics reflect that hatchery supply. The Yearbook of Fisheries Statistics of Bangladesh 2023-24, published in December 2024, lists chital among the 'other species' whose hatchlings were produced by private hatcheries in 2024, and counts chital within the 'other inland fish' group in its tables of catch from beels.

The guide's idea of feeding chital with tilapia young rests on the way tilapia breed. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in its 2009 fact sheet on Nile tilapia, describes the fish as reaching sexual maturity in ponds at five to six months of age and beginning to spawn when the water reaches 24 °C. The female carries the eggs in her mouth and broods the fry until the yolk sac is absorbed, which takes one to two weeks depending on temperature. A 100 g female produces about 100 eggs per spawn, and a female of 600 to 1,000 g can produce 1,000 to 1,500. Where there is no cold period, she may spawn continuously.

In an ordinary food-fish pond this is a problem. FAO notes that uncontrolled breeding of tilapia in ponds leads to excessive recruitment, competition for food and stunting, and that in mixed-sex populations the young may make up as much as 70 percent of the harvest weight. That is why commercial tilapia farmers usually stock all-male fish. A chital pond turns the same habit to use: the brood tilapia keep producing small fish, and the predator converts them into a high-value fish.

Research supports the use of chital as a biological check on tilapia in carp ponds. A farm study in Purulia district, West Bengal, India, run from 2018 to 2020 and published in 2022 in the Asian Journal of Research in Zoology, compared ponds of about one hectare each. Indian major carps were stocked at 8,000 fingerlings per hectare in a 4:3:3 ratio of catla, rui and mrigal. After one pond had been invaded by Mozambique tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus), wild chital juveniles were introduced. The authors reported that as the chital grew, tilapia fry recruitment fell, chital survival stayed high, and carp growth was poorest in the pond that held tilapia without chital. They concluded that excessive tilapia recruitment in a carp pond can be controlled by chital. The Rajshahi study likewise cites earlier Indian work showing that chital can correct the population imbalance caused by the wild breeding of common carp and of minnows in composite carp ponds.

The most direct Bangladeshi evidence on chital in ponds comes from the University of Rajshahi. Researchers from its Department of Fisheries reared chital fry in nine earthen ponds of the university's hatchery complex for 75 days, from 1 August to 15 September 2014, and published the results in the Journal of Sylhet Agricultural University in 2016. The fry, collected from the Padma River at Rajshahi, weighed 6 g on average when stocked. The ponds, of about 0.002 hectare and 1 metre deep, were cleared of weeds and unwanted fish and limed and fertilised before stocking, and the fish were given a prepared feed of fish meal, rice bran, wheat bran, maize bran, mustard oil cake and a vitamin premix with 27.5 percent protein.

Three stocking densities were compared: 14,820, 13,585 and 12,350 fry per hectare. The lowest density did best on every measure the researchers reported. The fish there reached a mean final weight of 26.33 g against 21.32 g at the highest density, survival was 94.50 percent against 82.33 percent, production was 300.78 kg per hectare, and the cost-benefit ratio was 1.8 against 1.2. The study recorded water temperatures of about 29 to 30 °C and dissolved oxygen of about 5.4 to 5.6 mg per litre, which it described as within the good productive range, citing earlier work that a productive pond should hold 5 mg of oxygen per litre or more.

Work in India has filled in the earlier stages. In the 2006 Biodiversity and Conservation study, researchers induced wild chital to spawn in captivity in July 2002 and recorded large adhesive eggs of about 4.5 mm that stuck to hard surfaces and hatched 168 to 192 hours after fertilisation; the newly hatched larvae measured about 10 mm and kept their yolk sac for about a week. A 2015 study in Archives of Polish Fisheries followed the gut of the larvae from hatching to 30 days and found that the mouth opens at about 8 days after hatching, when the larvae begin to take food from outside, and that the stomach develops between 7 and 12 days. The authors described chital as a promising new candidate for diversifying freshwater aquaculture, and a 2018 review in Reviews in Fisheries Science and Aquaculture by the same group presented it as a new candidate species for aquaculture.

Chital enters a sector that is dominated by a handful of species. According to the DoF's Yearbook of Fisheries Statistics 2023-24, Bangladesh produced 50.18 lakh tonnes of fish in the 2023-24 financial year, and aquaculture provided 59.34 percent of it. Ponds covered 4.24 lakh hectares and produced 23.69 lakh tonnes, an average of 5.58 tonnes per hectare. The top eight pond species were pangas, tilapia, rui, silver carp, mrigal, catla, common carp and koi. Tilapia alone accounted for 4.40 lakh tonnes, 8.76 percent of national production, and the yearbook, citing FAO, puts Bangladesh fourth in the world in tilapia production. Fish supplied about 60 percent of the animal protein in the national diet, at 67.80 g per person per day.

Banglapedia describes mixed fish farming in Bangladesh as the stocking together of fish that use different layers and foods of a pond, typically catla, rui and mrigal, with exotic carps, catfishes, tilapia and prawns added in recent years, and notes that a pond of at least 0.2 acre has been found suitable for mixed farming of large fish such as the carps. It describes beels as saucer-shaped depressions that swell into broad, shallow sheets of water in the rains and often shrink or dry in winter, and the gher as an enclosure in the coastal polders where shrimp, prawn and fish are farmed, in places together with tilapia and carps. These are the larger waters the Jagonews24 guide recommended for chital.

The guide's practical claim, that chital can be grown alongside rui and catla with tilapia young as its food, is consistent with the published research on chital as a predator of small fish in carp ponds. The figures it gave for stocking and yearly growth remain the guide's own, and readers planning a chital pond can check them, together with the pond preparation and feeding their own water needs, with the upazila fisheries office.

Photo: Sm faysal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). The top picture shows chital (left) and boal for sale in a market in Bangladesh, as background.

Sources: Jagonews24, Samakal, Prothom Alo, Department of Fisheries (Yearbook of Fisheries Statistics of Bangladesh 2023-24), FAO (Cultured Aquatic Species Fact Sheet: Nile tilapia), FishBase, Journal of Sylhet Agricultural University (Samad et al., 2016), Biodiversity and Conservation (Sarkar et al., 2006), Asian Journal of Research in Zoology (Samaddar et al., 2022), Archives of Polish Fisheries (Mitra et al., 2015), Heliyon, IUCN Red List, Banglapedia, Wikipedia